An early-shopping mother had bought a Sunday red Tiger Woods branded shirt as a Christmas present for her adult son. She was talking with a group of women about whether she should take it back to the store and exchange it for another brand.

One suggestion: It's his gift, let him take it back if he wants.

Mother: Well... I'd feel good if he did that, but what if he doesn't? Then I'd be annoyed whenever I saw him wear it.

Another said: It's your shirt until you give it to him. If it makes you feel icky, return it. He'll never know.

Mother: I'll take it back this afternoon.

That's the abridged version. No one really questioned why the mom would feel that way or that her desire to dump the shirt was at all off base.

Let me speculate here that a men's discussion might go differently, with the least noxious statement being to the effect that it's just a shirt.

I, for one, have changed my buying pattern and no longer will purchase
Nike, Gatorade or any Pepsi products, Gillette is a goner, AT&T
will never be my cell phone carrier and I no longer use my AmEx credit
card. [...]

And Jason responds:

give me a break, you expect us to believe that you will not purchase
nike, pepsi, gillette, at&t, or amex products – this is a crock,
and any educated consumer will base their purchase decisions on product
quality and perceived value, not sponsorship

Kurt also rationalizes:

First of all, the sponsor companies did not know about Tiger’s
actions until after the fact. This is why you are seeing and will
continue to see certain sponsors drop Tiger. So you can’t really blame
the consumer companies. They did what they thought to be best at the
time of acquiring him as a spokesperson.

The sponsored athlete does not make the products good, the producing company does. The athlete is merely a marketing strategy.

Like Jason said, if you are dumb enough to buy or drop products
solely because of the associated athlete, then you are NOT a smart,
educated consumer.

These guys totally miss the fact that they are paying extra for the "perceived value" of a $75 to $100 TW shirt. They are ignoring their own response to the emotional dimension of brands, as well as the fact that women consumers may view Tiger's behavior differently than they do.

Bill has a more nuanced take:

I
see Nike & Woods as actually four brands: 1) the Tiger Woods
garments with his TW logo. These sales will suffer. 2) Nike golf clubs
which had a poor image until Tiger won with them. These too may suffer,
somewhat. 3) Nike golf clothing. Not a factor. You’re not going to
switch to inferior fabrics/styles at Adidas etc. to avoid the swoosh.
4) Other Nike sporting goods. Not a factor. But back to #1 and 2…Nike
has to think twice about its ads showing Tiger in a “heroic”
follow-thru pose.

Given that a lot of menswear is purchased by women, Nike has to
be concerned about the likelihood that its Tiger line of
clothing is going to take a hit. For how long remains to be seen, but the value of his endorsement has to have plummeted.

And if sales do drop, it's certainly not a matter of women not being "smart, educated consumers."

Natural to behave irrationally? Not from the free-market economist's point of view. Climate change is just
one more policy problem designed for the market to suss out as it efficiently collects information about the decisions of rational humans acting in their own best interest.

However, the WaPo article describes how behavioral psychology provides insight into reasons why humans may not pay attention to — and take action on — climate change. The barriers include:

psychological distance — sense that this is a problem for somebody
else or some other time

complexity — the mechanics aren't easy to understand, and skeptics question the evidence

system justification — we favor and defend the status quo

finite pool of
worry — we can only handle so many problems at once

Given the barriers, how to address climate change before it's too late?

Appeals to save energy based on helping the environment, being socially responsible or saving money appear to be less effective than saying the majority of your neighbors are doing it, according to the article.

This reminded me of similar finding (which I couldn't locate) related to tax compliance. Filers were most likely to declare all their income and not claim false deductions if they heard most people did not cheat on their returns. The "almost everyone's honest" approach worked better than telling filers about penalties, their duty as citizens or the good uses to which taxes are put.

*****

Looking for the tax study citation, I did come across this nugget about the "net
misreporting rate" (of underreported
income and inflated deductions):

[T]axpayers whose true income was between $500,000 and $1 million a
year understated their adjusted gross incomes by 21% overall in 2001,
compared to an 8% underreporting rate for those earning $50,000 to
$100,000 and even lower rates for those earning less. [...]

In
all, because of their higher noncompliance rates, those with true
incomes of $200,000 or more received 25% of all income, but accounted
for 40% of net underreported income and 42% of underreported tax in
2001, the new analysis finds.

In other words, all our assumptions about the wealthy paying a smaller proportion of their incomes in taxes may be conservative if they are misstating their income and deductions.

*****

Here's another study (abstract only) that appears to suggest people who are trained in economics may view tax compliance differently than those who are trained to view the world behaviorally.

Italian psychology and economics students took
part in a tax compliance study that showed participants declared more income as purported detection rates rose and when tax was
framed as a gain. Psychologists declared less on their returns when they were
instructed to maximize (keep more) income, while economists declared the least regardless of how they were instructed.

****

If you're interested in this topic of how framing and default values influence choices, you might look at the TRAITS model put forward by Jay Hamilton and Scott de Marchi, or "libertarian paternalism" and "choice architecture" as explored in the book Nudge and other writing by Cass Sunstein:

What libertarian paternalists add is that the opposition between
"individual choice" and "government" is confusing and unhelpful when
government is inevitably establishing default rules that govern
outcomes if choices haven't been specifically made -- and that
influence people's choices in any case. A key point, then, is that
private and public institutions can't possibly avoid a form of
paternalism, so long as they establish default rules and starting
points. (For some reason, economists in particular seem not to
understand this point.) The question is how to make those starting
points as good as possible, while also preserving free choice.

I was going to give the biographies of Republican candidates for Minnesota governor equal time, but after reviewing their websites, it quickly became apparent they were going to be a lot less fun than the DFLers.

Let's just say, this field is self-thinning.

But even worse for my specific line of merry-making analysis, the GOP doesn't seem to exhibit the same level of ancestor worship. None of their candidates soared to the mythic-sounding heights in the life stories favored by the DFL candidates.

Purported front-runner Marty Seifert
came closest with how he "picked rocks, pulled weeds, picked pickles on
his hands & knees and
did various farm jobs to save money for college. He worked at the Dari
King in Redwood Falls while in high school and delivered pizzas for
Domino's Pizza of Marshall during college in order to work his way
through without any government grants." Presumably, the farm earned no
government subsidies, or else Marty sent back a portion of his pay.

Pat Anderson
of suburban North Oaks is a "fourth generation Minnesotan" whose
brother is a champion
professional sled dog musher in Alaska. That's about as compelling as
the heritage story gets, but Anderson's bio was actually was the best
among the candidates of both parties — assuming the objective of an
"About" page is to make the candidate sound like a real person rather
than simply an appealing archetype.

Anderson, with the sled dog reference, was not the only one to hitch a ride on the Palin ethos.

Tom Emmer
of suburban Delano played hockey in Alaska after leaving Boston College
and named one of his kids Tripp. But in case you were thinking he had
something in common with college hockey player Mark Dayton or BC alum
R.T. Rybak, Emmer "relentlessly represented insurance companies" and
"defended police officers against excessive force claims." He almost makes "trial lawyer" sound GOP-friendly.

Of the three H's — Bill Haas, David Hann and
Phil Herwig
—the first two hardly provide enough biography to tell them apart, let
alone to make their stories memorable. Herwig at times nearly strays
into Leslie "Earth Protector" Davis territory, promising to "push the envelope" on all sorts of policies and invoking Paul Wellstone.

Let's put it this way, Norm Coleman isn't second-guessing his party switch as he considers running again for the office he once lost to a wrestler and a 98-pound legacy candidate.

With mostly suburban entries, the GOP lineup is only marginally less city-centric than the DFLers'. So why do the family values candidates skip the Roots reruns?

Here's my theory: The Republicans believe their platform is closer to the outstate mindset, so they don't feel compelled to pretend they're just regular folks who have corn silk in their hair and iron ore in their blood. They're also less likely to care about people different from them, so they don't make pro forma attempts to reach out and establish empathy. Finally, they might just think it's fake to claim tenuous family connections as formative experiences.

Thank goodness I'm only a blogger instead of a candidate for Governor. Otherwise, my About page would have to read more like this:

Charlie Quimby was born in Rifle, Colorado, a town of about 2,000 known as the Trout Hatchery Capital of the World. Growing up in a large family in small towns on the western slope, he learned the value of hard work from putting himself through college with jobs in construction and oil exploration — and from his grandfather Homer Quimby who ran a hardscrabble Arizona cattle ranch near the Mexican border.

He was inspired by his great grandmother Jenny who, as a single mother, homesteaded in northern Colorado, and his maternal grandmother Emma, whose first husband died when her children were very young. Emma did bookkeeping for the Rifle Dodge dealer and took in laundry to support the family. One of her customers was "Pop" Nelson who had immigrated from Sweden at the age of 16 and worked for the railroad. They married...

The question of who's country and who's not came to me after listening to Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak at Drinking Liberally last week. I asked him who among his fellow contenders he'd have as a Lt. Governor running mate and to name names. He demurred, with good nature, and then admitted he needed to work on his answer.

Checking the Greater Minnesota bona fides for the DFL contenders, I found most candidates either play the ancestry card or punt.

Mark Dayton (he "grew up in a house in Long Lake" which still sounds kinda rural)

Steve Kelley ("you could find himfeeding the family’s
two horses or climbing his favorite apple tree" ... before he left suburbia and headed off for exclusive Williams College)

Susan Gaertner (goes for the Pawlenty approach — she "grew up on the East Side of St. Paul
during the height of opportunity for working class families")

These guys got "roots"

Paul Thissen's "family roots in Minnesota date to the 1860s when his
great-great grandfather established a homestead along the banks of the
Minnesota River" (but Thissen grew up in Bloomington)

R.T. Rybak's "Minnesota roots
go back more than 150 years to New Prague, Minnesota, where you can
still see his family name carved in stone on a building on the main
street in town" (but R.T. himself is a Minneapolis kid who traces his early days to his dad's drug store at Chicago
and Franklin Avenues in south Minneapolis)

"It's hard to talk about Matt Entenza without talking about a town in
southwestern Minnesota called Worthington." (No, it's impossible. "Matt Entenza's Minnesota roots reach back to the 1870s" but he only spent three years in Worthington)

She will milk her youth

Margaret Kelliher Anderson grew up on a
dairy farm just outside of Mankato and was the 4-H State President and the Blue Earth County
Dairy Princess (which gives her some pasture cred, but she's now a representative from Minneapolis)

Unimpeachable Toms

Tom Rukavina grew up on "the north side of the small Iron Range city
of Virginia" and he's still up there (say no more, though he does)

Tom Bakk worked as a carpenter and union leader and lives near Cook on Lake Vermillion (is the pope Catholic?)

So who might be the DFL's 2010 Mae Schunk or Carol Molnau? Does the Dairy Princess go Iron Range or pick an urban partner to offset her supposed farm-tricity? Would Rukavina, who jokes about his stature, seek out a mini-Mee Muoa? Does "Entenza-is-Norwegian-for-Governor" pair himself with an actual Norwegian?

"I know it will be a good thing," Mary Milton told KARE Thursday as
she pondered the train that will pass right past her Transformation
Hair salon on University Avenue. But she concedes she's worried about
the loss of on-street parking to make room for the new line.

"We need our customers," Milton remarked, "It will be hard. We don't
have a lot of parking now, and if the[y] take what we've got it's going to
really have the business down a lot."

I don't know what day of the week or time of day Google Street View took this shot of the block where the hair salon does business, but from the shadows, it's in the afternoon. You can run up and down the street and see cross streets, where there's abundant parking.

Now ask yourself: how many customers does the business handle at one time? And how many people change their hair stylist because they can't park right in front of the door?

Maybe customers who drive will have a hard time reaching this business for their hair styling during construction and after the train is running. But I'm not seeing the problem.

The northern Plains were drying up and blowing away. As successive plagues descended on the Dakotas, residents thought they might be witnessing the end of the world. The New York Times printed a photograph with a caption that could have run in The Onion: “Cattle Invade a State Capitol. A herd driven from the drought area
contentedly grazes on the Capitol grounds at Bismarck, N. D.” It provoked a storm of protest — first that the photo was faked, and then that its caption led to a false inference.

If one can imagine the political animosity that would have been
generated if, as part of the current stimulus package, President Obama
introduced a national documentary photography program, then it is
possible to understand the opposition that the F.S.A. faced. Fiscal
conservatives did not want to see their hard-earned tax dollars spent
on relief, let alone a government photography program, of all things.
And in Arthur Rothstein’s photograph of a sun-bleached cow skull,
Roosevelt’s opponents had found their proof of government waste,
duplicity and fraud.

Filmmaker Errol Morris continues his series about what contemporary observers can learn from the photography of the Great Depression.

What makes these accusations of photo-fakery utterly perverse is the
claim that they unfairly portrayed a drought. The photographs led the
viewer to infer that the Dakotas were experiencing a drought. But the
Dakotas were experiencing a drought. One of the worst droughts in American history. Was the real
issue that the cow had died of old age rather than drought? Or that the
cow skull had been moved less than 10 feet, as Rothstein later claimed?
Or had been moved at all? Or that multiple photographs had been taken?
Or was it merely an attempt to shift the nature of the debate from the
agricultural problems facing the country to an argument about
photography and propaganda?

What makes an image not true? When does an art-directed photo move from documentary art to propaganda? How does the viewer's suppositions about the reality portrayed affect the response to a photo?

The Virgin of Guadalupe appears in California orchard stones, turtle shells and burned pancakes because of what a person of faith perceives in some random arrangement of contrasting colors and shapes. Here, the photo is unvarnished representation — any meaning or trickery is all in the mind of the beholder.

The meaning and emotional content of Lange's photo of the Alaska-bound Minnesotan depend greatly on its artful lighting and composition — and also on its context — but not upon any information conveyed intrinsically within the frame.

Today, it seems evident that Lange's heroic images were carefully directed and shot. Surely no impoverished immigrant boarded a Depression-era steamship in such natty duds or paused so pensively before gaze-paralleling rivets. We could place him in GQ unretouched, and he could sell us every article of his clothing: the newsboy cap and the wool shirt with its collar jutting just so out of the stippled leather jacket. Instead of a young man heading for an uncertain future in Alaska, we might see a hunk who helped give Sarah Palin her accent.

The truth is that most images we see are manipulations — maybe not as fraudulent as the footage of the Boy in the Balloon — but altered all the same, with lighting, framing, lenses, wind machines, make up, point of view, safety pins, glycerine, PhotoShop, cropping, captions and editorial selection from perhaps hundreds of variations. Finally, these are submitted for examination through the filters of our own prejudices and desires.

A balloon goes aloft and transfixes a nation because of a made-up story. An unseen drought becomes real to the rest of the country because of a cow skull arranged in a landscape. A hog farm becomes a presidential ranch because a Texas front man puts on a cowboy hat.

The Aspen Times writes about sudden aspen decline — the trees, not the town — and is careful not to push the climate change angle too hard. Same with the New York Times. (It wrote basically the same story three years ago.) The LA Times emphasizes the connection with this lede:

From the hillsides of extinct volcanoes in Arizona to the jagged peaks
of Idaho, aspen trees are falling by the tens of thousands, the latest
example of how climate change is dramatically altering the American
West.

Starting seven years ago, foresters noticed massive aspen die-offs
caused by parasitical insects, one of them so rare it is hardly even
written about in scientific literature. But with warming temperatures
and the effects of a brutal drought still lingering, the parasites are
flourishing at the expense of the tree, beloved for its slender
branches and heart-shaped leaves that turn a brilliant yellow in autumn.

But did his behavior warrant calling the police? He was only looking in the window of a house for sale in a low-income neighborhood, not shouldering the door open. We've learned he is apparently mellower than Henry Gates when he is not recognized.

We've also learned he's so unthreatening that he's planning a Christmas album, which will pretty much take the fun out of my little holiday tradition of doing Dylan interpretations of Christmas carols.

By all accounts, the company scheduled to open a foster home in Centerville is a model operator, and it followed the law in preparing to house and supervise four teenage boys with mental and developmental disabilities. But the neighbors and some county officials didn't hear about the plan until the home was ready to open.

The poor communication with neighbors triggered fears that their children might be endangered — plus the all-purpose NIMBY response that property values will be brought down. (There's also available, remember, the complaint that property values will go up, for those cases when change comes in the form of an improvement that might attract undesirable amenity-seekers.)

Last week while I was doing yard work, a prosperous-looking couple pulled up and asked me if I knew of any houses for sale in the neighborhood. We love this area, they said. And I agreed it was a great neighborhood — well-kept homes with a creek and park nearby, easy access to freeways, less than 30-minutes to downtown by bike, express bus service and a grocery within 3/4-mile walking distance.

I did tell them about one house not yet on the market that was in foreclosure because the owner's business had gotten in trouble some years ago and he made the mistake of remortgaging his house to pull through. I didn't tell them that three of the householders on our street are gay and one family is black. Nor did I mention there are at least two group homes within the small neighborhood radius I just described.

Didn't mention it, because it didn't even occur to me at the time.

In our last house, we lived across the street from a large group home in Minneapolis just southeast of Lake Harriet. When we put our place on the market, 65 realtors showed for the open house and we had three offers on the table within three days.

I'm not saying it was the same market back then, but it won't be when the Centerville owners are selling, either.